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Dell Takes Health Care Online
abb_road writes "Dell will announce today that it will begin offering employees an online system to track health care; the system, which will focus on insurance claims, doctor visits and prescriptions, is expected to improve employees' medical safety while reducing costs. The electronic records are expected to dramatically improve preventative care; employees will receive ongoing alerts for suggested and continuing treatment of health conditions. The system should also improve coordination among health care providers, especially when patients need to see multiple physicians. Other employers are expected to follow Dell's lead; the government 'has estimated that health IT can add $140 billion a year to the productivity of the $2 trillion health care industry.'"
This is nothing new, my health insurance has an online system and so do many others.
Clippy pops up in the corner...
`It looks like you have cancer. Would you like to book a session of radiotherapy?'
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
I'm always skeptical of blanket prescriptions for health care, or for what IT can and cannot do in the macroeconomic sense to solve a problem. For example, "the government 'has estimated that health IT can add $140 billion a year to the productivity of the $2 trillion health care industry.'" Is that indeed added to the 'productivity' of the industry, or is that added to the cost? The Dell implementation looks innovative (to a degree) and hopefully for them (and their employeees) will show a benefit; but I can already hear the chorus of those who have fought against real reform in the healthcare industry saying that the best solution is throw more IT at the problem. IT has never really worked any better than the proverbial money we used to throw.
From TFA:
So let me get this straight - this incredible new initiative is actually a lightly-used website, run by WebMD, that Dell employees have had for the past two years. And the newness is that the system can now "electronically" capture results. And Dell trumpets this in a major news release.
We will set aside the interesting question of how (and whether) WebMD has convinced thousands of independent labs, as well as laboratory giants like LabCorp, to send results to WebMD. We will ignore the HIPAA regulations that will require patients to sign releases with anyone sending results to WebMD. We will overlook the balkanized, backward, and poorly-penetrated electronic medical records world in which these patients' doctors work.
Even if all of these things were somehow not an issue, does anybody except Dell and WebMD marketing droids really believe that the only thing that was preventing this dramatic breakthrough from revolutionizing medical care for everybody was the lack of a stupid HL-7 interface?
Oh, wait. Never mind. Check the last part of the article:
Yup. Sure. Got it. Tinfoil hats meet blue-sky dreamers, and the result is ugly.
If my health insurance provider wanted to provide a one-stop shop website where I could track that, that'd be good.
It (theoretically) would provide me all the info I need and provide a gateway back to the company about what health information they could get on me.
Putting the company in-the-loop for this is just a bad idea in terms of privacy. (Although I've been in companies where you had to paper file the insurance claims for doctor's visits through the HR department... though I don't know if that was required or just provided as a convenience)